AMERICA: REAL AND IMAGINEDBritish Association of American Studies Annual Postgraduate ConferenceSaturday November 15th, 2008The University of ExeterExeter, United Kingdom

Keynote speaker: Professor Judith Newman (University of Nottingham)

The School of Arts, Languages and Literatures at the University of Exeteris pleased to be hosting the annual BAAS postgraduate conference. We areseeking proposals for 20-minute papers on all topics from all disciplineswithin the field of American Studies, including history, music, literature,philosophy, film studies, politics, sociology, popular culture, pedagogyand language.

This year we are especially interested in papers presenting new ideas andarguments that engage with the theme of â€œAmerica and the West.â€

The West is often used as a generic term for the civilization that grew upand out of Greece, spreading first to Italy and then to northern Europe,before crossing the Atlantic and taking root in the New World â€“ principallyin the United States. This spread has been accompanied by the disseminationof core values that originated in classical antiquity, including limitedconstitutional government, civil liberties, the free exchange of ideas,private property, capitalism and the separation between religious andpolitical/scientific thought â€“ values all variously embodied in competingand contested ideas about the United States. Yet within the U.S. there alsois a West, both real and imagined. Annexation, migration and expansion westof the Mississippi was accompanied by theories about manifest destiny andthe movable frontier as the site of contestation between the competingvalues of civilization and wilderness. Today, the â€œAmerican Westâ€ canalternately conjure images of cowboys in Texas or hippies in San Francisco.

Possible areas of inquiry might include, but are by no means limited to:

â€¢ The American West/America as the Westâ€¢ American/Western mythsâ€¢ American and Western politicsâ€¢ America/the West as represented in visual mediaâ€¢ The West(ern) as genreâ€¢ Cultures of/bordering the United Statesâ€¢ The imagined Westâ€¢ Mapping the Westâ€¢ America and the heritage of classical antiquityâ€¢ America and its alliesâ€¢ East and Westâ€¢ Writing America and/or the Westâ€¢ The movement of historyâ€¢ Western/westernizing narrativesâ€¢ Frontiers and borderlands

Interested postgraduate students are encouraged to submit an abstract of nomore than 200 words along with a brief biography (including institutionalaffiliation) to baas_at_ex.ac.uk no later than June 30th, 2008. For moreinformation, please visit http://www.sall.ex.ac.uk/conferences/